External Hard Drive

Have had a couple and use them for back up mostly, but they work for most anything you want. The first one gave me a lot of fits due to not enough usb ports, when I gave it its own rather than on a hub it worked okay.

My latest is a Maxtor, but they only have a 90 day warranty so you might take that into consideration, but then again if it is really cheap

I don't know that there is much difference. My maxtor doesn't have an on/off switch so if that is important to you be sure to look into that.

There are also cases available for not much money that you can buy if you have an old drive laying around you want to use. They also have 2.5 inch cases if you have a laptop drive laying around.

 

I use one all of the time and after a lot of trouble I finally spent the money to get it right. I highly recommend Firewire over USB but if your application isn't critical, USB is fine. Also, an Oxford 911 Chipset is much better than anything else. I got my case from Other World Computing, www.owc.com and I got a Maxtor drive from Staples. It is a 120 GB drive and the whole thing cost about $160 but I got the drive about a year and a half ago so I am sure they are lower now, the case I just got recently after having fits with an ADS case with a lousy Firewire bridge in it and that was $70 but well worth it.
There are two main reasons for using an external drive..I use them for both reasons, the first is portable mass storage. It is great to be able to take an audio or video project to another system and load it up, but I also use a laptop so external expansion is a must.
What kind os system do you have? If you could list brand/cpu brand and speed, memory etc that would be great, also what king of I/O ports you have, USB 1.1, USB 2.0, FIrewire etc.